Understanding Assist Clicks and Assisted Conversions [PART 1]

Google AdWords allows advertisers to add custom columns to their campaign statistics. Metrics include impression share, bid strategy type, shares, comments, follows, and more. One of the most underestimated tools are the custom columns for search funnels, namely assist clicks and assisted conversions. This article is designed to demystify the process and make it easier for you to implement these tools.

Where to Find Assist Clicks and Assisted Conversions

If you already know where to add competitive metrics in AdWords, jump to the next heading. Otherwise, here are brief instructions on customizing columns.

Sign in to AdWords and open the your account

Go on All online campaigns

Click on Columns above the graph

Choose Customize columns in the drop down menu

Source: Screenshot of Google AdWords taken by author

The types of custom columns available to you depends on the campaigns you are running on your account. Here is an example of what your custom columns might look like:

Source: Screenshot of Google AdWords taken by author

As seen above, assist clicks and assisted conversions can be found under Search Funnels which is a standard metric and should show up in every AdWords account.

This is part one of the article explaining assist clicks.

Definition of Assist Clicks

Assist clicks occur only when more than one search ad has been clicked prior to a conversion. Any search ad click that happens before the last click immediately before a conversion is referred to as an assist click. Since assist clicks are displayed on a keyword level, the definition can be adapted to make it more precise.

The Assist Click column displays any number of clicks on a search ad triggered by the same keyword that happened prior to the last click that leads to a conversion.

In order to fully understand assist clicks, I have created three concrete examples of real life scenarios and how the results are displayed in the assist clicks custom column in Google AdWords.

Example 1:

A user searches on Google for black shoes, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. A week later, the same user searches on Google for brown shoes, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. One week later, the same user searches on Google for white shoes, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. Two days later the same user searches on Google for black boots and converts.

The process would look like this:

black shoes > brown shoes > white shoes > black boots > conversion

Since assist clicks exclude the last click directly prior to the conversion, we can cross out black boots. Any other clicks before black boots is an assist clicks. Therefore we have three assist clicks (black shoes, brown shoes, and white shoes). Keep in mind that the assist click column does not display the amount of assist clicks per conversion but the number of assist clicks per keyword.

Assist clicks are marked in green for the same process as displayed above:

black shoes > brown shoes > white shoes > black boots > conversion

The assist clicks column would therefore display the following:

Source: Example of assist clicks created by author

Example 2:

A user searches on Google for black shoes, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. 1 week later, the same user searches on Google for brown shows, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. A week later, the same user searches on Google for black shoesagain, clicks the ad and doesn’t convert. Two days later the same user searches on Google for black boots and converts.

The process would look like this:

black shoes > brown shoes > black shoes > black boots > conversion

Since assist clicks exclude the last click directly prior to the conversion, we can cross out black boots. Any other clicks before black boots is an assist clicks. Therefore, we once again have three assist clicks (black shoes, brown shoes and black shoes). Keep in mind that the assist click column does not display the amount of assist clicks per conversion but the number of assist clicks per keyword.

Assist clicks are marked in green for the same process as displayed above:

black shoes > brown shoes > black shoes > black boots > conversion

The assist clicks column would therefore display the following:

Source: Example of assist clicks created by author

In comparison to Example 1, the keyword black shoes now shows two assist clicks because it assisted twice.

Example 3:

Now let’s look at what happens when two different users searching and some of the keywords are overlapping.

As seen above, two different clients converted with different search funnels that both started with the same keyword.

The assist clicks column would therefore display the following:

Source: Example of assist clicks created by author

In this case, the keyword black shoes assisted twice even though it assisted two different conversions. Since assist clicks aren’t displayed per conversion but per keyword, black shoes shows two assist clicks.

Example of Using Assist Click Insights

Understanding sssist clicks can prevent optimization mistakes such as the pausing of keywords that start a search which ultimately ends up in a conversion. For instance, imagine the following scenario:

The keyword black boots regularly gets a significant amount of profitable conversions but the keyword black shoes does not. As a matter of fact, you can see in the account that the keyword black shoes accumulates a lot of clicks but rarely or never converts. You consequently pause the keyword black shoes to allocate more budget to the keyword black boots. For no apparent reason, immediately after having taken that action the conversion rate for the keyword black boots decreases dramatically.

What happened?

In order to find out, you add the custom column assist clicks because you suspect the keyword black shoes is the beginning of a search process that is closely related to searches who later search for black boots and convert. As the assist clicks columns shows in AdWords, this is in fact the case.

You can then revert the change that caused the issue based on the insights you have gained through the assist clicks column by reactivating the keyword black shoes.

Conclusion

Assist clicks can be essential when it comes to keyword optimization and understanding the search funnel report in Google AdWords. It provides detailed information about the relevancy of each keyword to the amount of conversions it has indirectly contributed to.

However, the concept must be fully understood in order to interpret the information correctly. Also, consider that the assist clicks column does not indicate the profitability of the clicks it displays.